Date   : Sun, 20 Jun 2004 14:50:20 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: PC/Econet

On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 12:17, Sprow wrote:
> > I'm not sure where the hang-up requiring Acorn to include a 6502 on the
> > ISA Econet board was - whether it was a speed issue with ISA bus itself
> 
> Or maybe it was just that they had a lovely hand crafted assembler Econet
> software stack and the least effort approach could therefore have been to
> run it natively and bolt on an ISA interface (say, triggered by an IRQ) than
> to port it all to a PC driver?

Well I read somewhere that it was due to the PCs of the day not being
quick enough, so Acorn put a 6502 on to the board to drive the Econet
side of things, with a bit of buffer memory between the 6502 and the
PC's CPU. Just wish I could remember where I saw that now!

If I get chance I'll get the manual for the ISA board out of the loft
later and see if Acorn themselves give a reason.

> Slap the 68B54 on a PCI card I say.

Sounds like a lot of effort though :-( Personally I'd prefer a parallel
port version assuming it can be done - especially as I'm out of free PCI
slots on the desktop comp ;-)

> And what's all this "reply to the person and CC the list" business? Surely
> someone wouldn't unsubscribe from the list within hours of making a post?

Hmm. I do it (except this time :-) because everyone else does and it
seemed to be an unwritten rule for the list when I first joined.

Having said that, sometimes I do just read inbox mail if I'm in a rush
and only catch up with various mailing lists (which get filtered into
seperate folders) when I have the chance, so it can be nice having
personal replies to something which I've asked sent directly to me. More
useful on high-volume lists, though...

Aside - I just noticed in Evolution if I do a 'reply to all' it goes to
the list and sender. Fair enough. If I do 'reply to sender' then it goes
to the sender. Also fair enough. If I do 'reply to list' though the
message goes to both the list *and* the sender. No idea why that doesn't
work for the BBC list as expected, but works on other mailing lists...

cheers

Jules